Across some of the Hartford's neighborhoods, homes have sat vacant for years, and residents say officials needs to take action or the city may never recover.
The empty house at 1912-14 Broad Street in the Maple Avenue neighborhood is flanked by tall shrubbery and unkempt grass. The windows and doors are boarded up with plywood, and garbage is strewn around the backyard.
Hyacinth Yennie chairs the Maple Avenue Revitalization Group and says something has to be done to improve the Broad Street house and similar structures around the city.
"We have lots of these properties that belong to the banks and I’m expecting somebody, somebody in the city to hold these banks accountable to clear their property, but there’s no one," she said.
Yennie says it's the city's responsibility to work to improve neighborhoods.
"This city needs to get focused on blighted property in our city. The fact is that we’re losing homeownership in the city, and if you want people to move into the city, you have to hold people accountable to keep their property clean," Yennie said.
Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra said a good opportunity for improvement is to propose capital projects that could be funded by the city's Participatory Budgeting Program. The program allows residents to provide input and proposals as the city decides how to spend spend $1.2 million.
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"The process is to have the residents make decisions about where the money should be spent, so whatever the community decides, where their priorities are, a portion of the money should be decided and put toward those projects," he said.
